At CA Technologies, we are in the business of helping organizations think strategically about IT.  There are few topics that have entered into this discussion more often over the past several years than IT energy savings.  While there are numerous ways to lower a company’s IT energy burn, perhaps the most effective is server virtualization.

Server virtualization allows business to encapsulate the operating systems and applications normally residing on individual servers into unique, software-based Virtual Machines (VMs), many of which can reside on a single server. This dramatically increases the portability, efficiency, manageability, reliability and end user accessibility of an organization’s computing resources. It also dramatically lowers the energy consumption of a data center.

At CA Technologies, we have experienced these benefits first hand with our Labs on Demand. Through the creation of a private cloud and VMs, we’re rationalizing 40 R&D labs. Over 5 years, that translates to an estimated saving of 16,000 square feet of data center floor space and the associated cooling required, emissions reduction of 6200 metric tons, and $16 million in productivity gains and facilities costs.

Server virtualization reduces number of physical servers, energy consumption 

As a general rule, business can expect up to a 10 to 1 reduction in the number of physical servers with a well planned and implemented virtualization project.  By eliminating vast amounts of unused computing resources residing on underutilized servers and combining them onto virtualized environments, businesses can drastically reduce the number of servers in their data centers. And, energy reduction is not limited to simply reduced server inventory. Virtualization software can also monitor host resource utilization based on pre-defined thresholds and take action to maximize energy efficiency.  For example, if particular servers are running at a low utilization rate late at night, the system can migrate the VMs on that machine to different servers and put the initial machines to sleep to reduce energy consumption – all with little or no service interruption.  When employees start logging back in and more computing resources are necessary, the software reverses the process and capacity increases.  It is not unheard of in larger data center implementations to generate ROI on a virtualization project through energy savings alone.

With businesses working to streamline operations and find cost and energy savings, taking a look at server virtualization makes a lot of sense.  And of course, from the sustainability team’s point of view, we’re thrilled every time we hear of another success story.